


The Strength of Forever

by TheSigyn



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:54:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sensual description of the Doctor and Sarah Jane’s century-spanning relationship. A more detailed and introspective and frankly adult snapshot of a scene from the story I told in No Mistake. (But you can read this one by itself.) Takes place just after Journey’s End.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Strength of Forever

  
When he kisses me, I feel it. What he does to me. My body opening, my mind expanding, my soul soaring. He can do that to me. He can do anything. The strength of forever is inside him.   
  
We probably shouldn’t be doing this. He didn’t mean to come here. He didn’t mean to touch me. He certainly didn’t mean to love me again.   
  
Except he never stopped loving me. Not really. And as always, when I opened my doors, he came to me. He can’t help it. He never can. Not with me. I didn’t realize that. I thought it was my fault. I thought it was over. But he has no restraint when it comes to Sarah Jane.  
  
I can’t help it, either. I should have let him go, for real. I should have abandoned his sort of impossible love. I should have found solace in someone else. Harry Sullivan... but I couldn’t stand him. Mike Yeats... until I realized he’d probably rather have Harry than me. I didn’t want Mike, anyway. I didn’t want anyone. All I wanted was my Doctor, and this slow burning, night long lava flow of love, the kind that can devastate whole mountain sides and empower entire cities. I wanted him even when I told myself I had stopped waiting. Eventually I stopped carrying Jelly Babies in my purse. But I still — always — keep some on the top shelf in the cupboard. I couldn’t help it. I never stopped hoping.   
  
He’s deep inside me, pulsing and pulling. The Doctor returns to me, and I become a TARDIS, pulsing with the power of the engines, letting him travel through time. His world has not burned to ashes. His friends are not scattered to the winds. He is not a bitter and heartbroken lonely soul, traveling the universe because there’s nowhere else to go. He’s young again. Mine again. Tall and strong, mad and flippant and hungry. He is time traveling with me more than he ever can with all his technology and all his magic. In me, he travels to his own past. He peers into his own future, and it doesn’t seem so bleak.   
  
I am time traveling, too. I am young again, in so many ways. My heart is not wounded now. My life has not been a long, slow tide of time, waiting and waiting and waiting for what could never come again. I’ve found my place, now, with my son and my purpose, but all that wasted time has weighed heavy on me. The weight is gone now. My age has faded. I am regenerated by his touch. My body feels strong and passionate. I’m ready to hold him to me, building my passion into yet another flare, grinding against him until I am no longer Sarah Jane Smith, no longer even human.   
  
But I am human. And that makes this so wonderful for him.   
  
He’s backwards.   
  
A human man who cares enough to do it right starts quietly, building and strengthening, slowly increasing tension with passion, until in the end it bursts forward, and he falls, exhausted and content.   
  
The Doctor begins with hunger. With desperation. The first time he entered me, I thought he was dying. He cried out with it, the relief of finally finding a home. He groaned as loud and desperate as a scream, as if he’d been waiting for this for centuries.  
  
Sometimes I wonder if the first time, he had been.   
  
He wouldn’t say, you know. If he had had a lover since leaving Galifrey with his granddaughter it was something so private or so painful that he never mentioned it. But often times, I wonder, because when he finally came to me, he knew he shouldn’t. He simply couldn’t help himself.   
  
He knew better, the first time. Better than to risk our friendship. Better than to risk hurting me. But it was one of those days. Another day, another danger, death at every turn, and when we came home to the TARDIS he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. His gaze was so heavy, I could feel his eyes staring through me, weighing me down. I’d never felt such a draw. I was trembling before he even touched me.   
  
I think he only meant to hug me. I think he was just feeling me, his friend, alive and safe, and he was alive, and we had made it through one more day. But the weight of his own gaze held him down, gravity molding his hands to my shoulders. I gasped at the contact, melted in it. The moment I opened my eyes to him, he folded. I think my gaze was as heavy as his.   
  
The kiss was like falling into the sun. He didn’t ask me. I didn’t ask him. He had me pushed against the control console, and I may have sat on something dangerous, but the TARDIS survived it, and so did we. Maybe the TARDIS wanted me, too. With his long fingered hands he lifted my skirt (I wore so many skirts back then! Short ones. Tight ones. Professional, perhaps, but I knew what they looked like) and I found his trousers, and we found each other, and his cry could have cracked the earth. I was disappointed, for thirty seconds. I thought, ‘After all this... this is all you give me? Ten seconds? One brief moment, and you’re done?’   
  
But he wasn’t done. He had hardly begun. He drew me from the control room and down the pale white hallways, and into my bedroom, and spent the next six hours slowly changing my universe.   
  
He told me later that the magic was in me. A Time Lord begins with the release, the impact of need. After that it’s an easing of the hunger, a bleeding of the tension, until the burning fades away and he is finally left content. But a human builds.   
  
A human starts quietly. A draw of desire. A tingle of pleasure. Like lava beneath the earth, we bubble and we simmer, building our tension, stoking our desire, rocking and pulsing, needing more and more, a desperation for release until the end is an eruption, blanking out thought and reason. And we can burn still. Or I could. Repeats and aftershocks, as he slowly bled his passion into me, as he came gently down and I came up, and up, and up, coming again and again and again, until the world went black and I would have been content to die, right there.   
  
With me, he said, there was power. I was an engine. He was a match, just one big spark that would start the fire, and he would stoke it slowly, and then I would hold the power, moving us forward, taking it from a slow, sad ending to an exciting and unpredictable journey of passion.   
  
He had warned me it would be months in between. In truth, it was never more than two. With me, he said, he was insatiable. It was like being a teenager. Granted it was early after his fourth regeneration, but he said he’d never been like that before. Not even in his first life, with his Galifreyan wife. I was flattered.   
  
I guess in the end we burned too bright. The candle at both ends. He had to leave. Once he’d left, he couldn’t bear to come back.   
  
Until now.   
  
He feels so different. Skinny and bony. He’s actually smaller all around, but I can’t complain. I’m softer, and greyer, my skin has lost its firmness and my breasts their fullness. Things are different between us. But the power is the same. It’s building, now, again, washing through me. I’m moaning, quite unable to stop myself. Tiny, short moans of movement as he pushes deep inside me. Things are going grey. I’m not breathing well. I need to calm down, or he’ll stop again, make me rest again, and I don’t want this to stop, not ever. Doctor, if you want to kill me with this, I’m here. Just fill me and fill me until there’s nothing left of me. Until I burst with you. Until I die of exhaustion, or old age, or both.   
  
Oh, God! I need more. Fill me, Doctor, fill me and push me, I need it. It’s not fair! It’s right there! Show me you feel that. Show me you know where the edge is! I need to go over. I need to fall, again, into you. Oh, find it, Doctor. It’s coming. It has to be coming. Give it to me, please! Just one... more....!  
  
Oh. Oh, Doctor. What am I going to do? The love of my life is an alien. It sounds like a tabloid. My need is over, though I know he’s not done. But I can’t. My body can’t...   
  
He turns me, running his thin hands over my shoulders, molding my trembling clay down onto my knees. I lay my head on my pillow as he kneels behind me. Yes, I can do this. I can let him do this for an hour, until I start to build again. Then I’ll need him to turn me.   
  
He slides inside, easily, my body still open. The door is always open for you, Doctor. This can always be home. Bleed into me. Pour yourself into me. Give me your pain and your passion and your loneliness. I can hold them for you, soften them for you, take away all the sharp edges and leave you ready to face the world. Let me be your solace, Doctor. Let me be your love.   
  
He tells me he loves me. With every move of his hand, with every pulse of his body, with every soft kiss, his eyes heavy with age and pain, those tell me loudest of all. I’m sorry I’m human, Doctor. I’m sorry I’m mortal. I’m sorry I can’t stay with you forever. I’m sorry we were always impossible. I’m sorry I made you fall in love with me, when we both knew you’d have to say goodbye.   
  
But I’m not sorry to have had you. Some things are worth having your heart broken for. Nights like this are more than worth it. When my body becomes incorporeal, when I become nothing but a measurement of time, worked upon by my Time Lord.   
  
His rhythm is soothing, like being rocked in a cradle, or traveling by sea. Tomorrow, I’ll be sore. My muscles will protest the exertion, and my skin will complain about the friction. But it’s not so bad. He makes me want him so badly that I stay ready for him, even after hours and hours in the same bed. It might be the scent, tangy and inhuman. I think it’s his hands. I think it’s his eyes. I think it’s the movement of the ages through his soul.   
  
I’m building again. I’m half asleep, but I need him. I start to hum, moving my hips in my desire. He chuckles. He whispers something about my being insatiable. He pulls away from me and takes me by the shoulders, turning me onto my back. He guides me to the edge of the bed, where with my legs over the edge he enters me again. I’m so tired, by this time. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve come. I can’t fathom why I want more, but I do.   
  
The darkness behind the curtains is fading. A thin, damning blue light is leaking from the sky. I find myself wishing we were still in the Medusa Cascade, that there would be no dawn. Not until the end of time. At least the end of my time.   
  
He’s tiring. His thrusts are slowing, the passion has almost faded. I think this is the last one I can carry, too. I wrap my legs around his bony hips — he’s gotten so skinny!— and touch his waist. He’s watching me, watching my body in the blue dawn, nude and heated and glowing. He says I look like an angel. I don’t say it, but he’s a god. More importantly, he’s the Doctor. My Doctor. My love. My life.   
  
He takes hold of my hips and pulls me against him. He’s moving me as much as he’s moving in me. He can’t take his eyes off me, as if he’s sure he’s never going to see me again. He doesn’t see into his own future, but I wonder. He’s probably right. Never going to see me like this, anyway. Never open and ready for him, never again as his lover.   
  
God, do I love him. I’m burning slowly, now, the embers banking down. But there’s enough in me for one more flare. He finds the spark and pushes it, nudging it into flame. The feeling that pours through me is languid and surreal, long past the burning cries of earlier in the night, this feels like a drug, or hot water, pouring through my body, leaving me with an exhausted glow. My eyes close and I sigh, holding him as tightly as I dare. He lets himself leave me, then embraces me, holding me as gently as if I was made of porcelain. With great tenderness he tucks me into the bed, laying himself beside me. He tucks the blankets over us and kisses my eyelids.   
  
Only at his kiss do I realize I’m crying. Because I know this is goodbye. I won’t say it. He can’t say it — it hurts him too much. But we both know it. Some things don’t need saying.   
  
I’m too tired to keep my eyes open. I let them fall as he lays beside me for a few more precious moments. I close my eyes and I dream. I dream, for a moment, that I am Rose. Or like Rose. I dream that I am young. I dream that I have my Doctor — my Doctor, from so long ago — human and mine forever. But the dream turns sad. The Doctor — this Doctor — is watching me. He needs me. He needs me to be there for him, even though he can’t be there for me. I turn away from my dream Doctor, abandon him, searching for the real one. But he’ll be gone, soon, too. I’ll stand alone.  
  
Strangely, I feel content with that.   
  
When I open my eyes he’s preparing to leave. I’m not surprised. Things were over for us a long time ago. This was a moment of stolen time. A beautiful, desperate journey into the past. Dwelling there is dangerous. It would end badly. We could only visit for one night.   
  
After he goes, I fall asleep. A dreamless, contented sleep. Tomorrow I’ll be human again. I’ll be Sarah Jane Smith again, journalist, mother, savior of the planet. I can do anything.   
  
The strength of forever is inside me, now. 


End file.
